Show Me Your Belly

Kathy Beard was born Catherine Beard in Ord, Nebraska, in 1958, the youngest of five children of a couple who had moved to the town in 1947. She went to Ord Public Schools until the tenth grade and then left. Apart from a year in Lincoln around 1980, when she could not find work with a tenth-grade education and came home, she never left Ord. She lived with her mother at L Street, did the laundry and the gardening her mother could no longer manage, and worked part time as a waitress at the Someplace Else Tavern, the bar that served as the town's social centre. She played pool and cards, liked country music and line dancing, wrote poetry, and was 31 in the spring of 1989.

the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it His family moved to Ord in 1967. As a teenager his custody passed from his father Dick to his mother Ann, whom he disliked, and from October 1981 he lived at St. Francis Academy, a boys' home; he graduated from Ord High School in May 1984. He joined the army in April 1986, served at Fort Ord in California, tore a ligament in his knee and was given a general discharge under honourable conditions in December 1987. Back in Ord he laid brick with his father, his uncle and a small crew. He had been pursuing Beard for years and she had always turned him down.

On 31 May 1989 Beard was not working but went to the Someplace Else anyway, reaching it around 7.30 in the evening. She wore faded blue jeans, a white fuzzy sweater with pink and grey horizontal stripes, tennis shoes and a turquoise ring. this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed At about 7.30 she left her keys, cigarettes, coat and a half-finished drink on the bar and went out the back door. She was never seen alive again.

the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now He told Kittinger that two men had hustled Beard away from him in a pickup. details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it Whitefoot and the owner, Kay Schaefer, reported her missing.

this part of the story is covered for now They had spent the evening with him, and he had offered them $100 each to find him a woman; they had taken him to the Someplace Else at about 7.30 looking for Beard. The robbery produced a nylon stocking, a sawn-off shotgun and a stolen telephone, but no money, and both men later passed polygraphs. details of the account remain covered until revealed Investigators concluded the two were trying to sound tough and ruled them out.

the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed He said he had propositioned her, been refused, and left; he described a custom F-150 with 88 county plates and a long-haired driver whose sex he could not tell. Questioned again on 11 June, he denied everything. The search went on through June, by foot, canoe and light aircraft, along the North Loup River, the Hardenbrook Dam and local wells, and found nothing. Sightings in Burwell, Morrill and Valentine came to nothing.

the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it In a Burwell gas station car park he asked a 51-year-old woman to show him her belly, punched her in the head when she refused, pulled up her shirt and rubbed and pinched her stomach before driving off. this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed It celebrated 'that gut, tummy, belly, abdomen, stomach, midriff' and listed women by name and rating, and it later destroyed his claim to have been a virgin until he married. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it

In April 1992 a woman picking up rubbish on her father-in-law's land at Party Hill, three miles east and two and a half miles south of Ord, found a partly buried skull and carried it to the police station. A search of the gully turned up human remains and personal items the family identified as Beard's. A forensic anthropologist found blunt trauma to the chest, face and skull and stab wounds to the ribs, lumbar vertebrae, sacrum and wrist, all inflicted before death. The striped sweater was buried separately, and a patch had been cut out of it over the abdomen. In February 1993, nearly four years after she vanished, more than 200 people attended a memorial and heard her poem 'I Am Richer Today'.

this part of the story is covered for now Police also found pornographic photographs of women with daggers and arrows drawn on their midsections.

details of the account remain covered until revealed Minnie, by then his ex-wife, told police in 2010 that he had admitted wanting sex with Beard that night and that he had a temper and an obsession with women's abdomens. A witness, Jerome Wakawiak, was reinterviewed in 2011 and could no longer say whether his 1989 story about a red-bearded man in a pickup was true.

the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now The defence produced a 'Sex Ranch Diary', 54 handwritten pages mailed from Omaha, claiming that Jean Backus had run Beard down on the Backus Ranch along with three other missing women. The court refused to admit the pages for lack of authenticity, though the defence was allowed to question witnesses about them, and Jean Backus, 88, denied ever keeping a diary. details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now